Michael Wolff over at Vanity Fair performs what may well be—considering the rumors of Scott McClellan’s imminent sacking—a premortem on poor in-over-his-head Scottie. And the vivisection is vivid. Wolff, unlike the domesticated White House correspondents who have to deal with McClellan every day and thus feel compelled to play nice, doesn’t hold back:
It’s this verbal haplessness that has made Scott McClellan—a pleasant, low-wattage, old-before-his-time young fellow, with, at 38, a wife, no children, and “two dogs and four cats”—the living symbol of this White House’s profound and, perhaps, mortal problem with language and meaning. McClellan himself, as though having some terrible social disability, has, standing miserably in the press briefing room every day, become a kick-me archetype. He’s Piggy in Lord of the Flies: a living victim, whose reason for being is, apparently, to shoulder public ridicule and pain (or, come to think of it, he’s Squealer from Animal Farm). He’s the person nobody would ever choose to be.
Wolff’s thesis is that McClellan’s monumental stolidity—a stolidity so great that it’s almost inconceivable that he would ever have enough imagination to go off message—and which observers in the past have seen as a triumph of Rovian public relations and just one facet of the administration’s contempt for the press, has been transformed into a political liability, now that Rove’s preferred direct-to-the-base-via-Fox-News-and-Rush communication strategy is foundering under a seemingly never-ending series of snowballing political disasters, leaving Scott’s inarticulate and oddly sheepish bullheadedness—transmitted instantly throughout the nation and the world by CSPAN and gleeful bloggers—the pitifully shorn face of the White House.
When Wolff was finally granted a private interview with McClellan, after having had his requests turned down for months, the writer discovered that beneath Scott’s phlegmatic, unresponsive, and obtuse public façade, there lies a phlegmatic, unresponsive, and obtuse man.
Get your schadenfreude on and read the whole thing.
Superb piece of writing, thanks for the link.